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Dancing with Crazy
Emily Pearson's memoir Dancing With Crazy is the true story of her personal derailment, both horrifically and humorously demonstrating what happens when mindless obedience to religious authority supersedes plain old common sense. As a young Mormon girl Emily gave up her own personal power, relinquished the ability to think for herself and allowed herself to blow with a wind that carried her from studying scriptures in the Sunday School classes of correctly clothed, righteous descendants of Mormon pioneers, to studying porn on San Francisco s Castro Street with her gay father and half naked drag queens, to drowning in depression in a stinky apartment in Hollywood, to puking in the toilet of a courting polygamist, to marrying her very own gay man in a Mormon Temple. After nearly losing her mind several times over, Emily disentangled herself from toxic and narcissistic personalities, walked away from a crippling religion and finally learned to think, act and live for herself. Dancing With Crazy is both heartbreaking and heart warming - an inspiring story filled with religious fundamentalists, transvestites, AIDS, love, abuse, obsession, visions, sex, Satan and salvation.
- GenresMemoir
322 pages, ebook
First published October 23, 2011
7 people are currently reading
82 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
September 4, 2012
Emily documents her story of growing up in a religion that tells you both that you are failing if you are anything less than perfect and simultaneously that you will never be perfect. This dichotomy is magnified by living in alternate worlds where her mother is a Mormon super hero and her father is the antithesis of what she is told is good yet she loves and admires both. Through the trials that repeatedly crash into her life she strives to balance the mixed worlds she is exposed to. At many points this drives her to make choices that only make her struggles worse. It is clear in her writing that though the events may be long past that they are still very real and current within her. The twists and turn kept me reading just to see what would happen next and how she would respond. By the end she appears to have worked through her issues and beliefs it still feels as though it is not completely resolved and maybe writing the book takes her a step closer. I would be to see what a new version 10 years from now looks like. If having lived a more resolved life will give perspective different that writing right as it feels she is beginning to heal. Overall a book that from a story standpoint could be entertaining for most but I believe can be very important for those both within Mormonism and those who have chosen to leave it. For those who remain it gives an insight into why someone who had had a seemingly storybook affirmation of faith in her youth would walk away and why it was the best choice for her. For those who have had to separate themselves from the religion of their youth is serves to reinforce that regardless of the decisions of others it was the best choice for them.
March 13, 2021
I was a little hesitant to read this book, since I am an active member of the LDS church. I was pleasantly surprised to see that Emily was able to write her negative experiences with church without being too offensive or disrespectful. Certainly in any organization- including churches- there are people and ideas that have become too extreme and cause harm. It was heartbreaking to see how often Emily was exposed to that harm during times when she was most vulnerable.
I feel like her decision to leave the LDS church makes sense, and I appreciate her sharing her story in a way that helps me see what her experience was like. As someone who teaches Sunday School, I want to be sure not to become a "Sister Damage". I feel like sharing these stories is one of the best ways to make sure the next generation can grow and learn in a loving, supportive environment instead of a harmful one.
I feel like her decision to leave the LDS church makes sense, and I appreciate her sharing her story in a way that helps me see what her experience was like. As someone who teaches Sunday School, I want to be sure not to become a "Sister Damage". I feel like sharing these stories is one of the best ways to make sure the next generation can grow and learn in a loving, supportive environment instead of a harmful one.
October 27, 2018
Overall, this is a wonderful book. I do wish that it was written with slightly more clarity - there were certain sections during which I was confused about what point the author was trying to make - but it definitely speaks to the importance of being your own person, and listening to yourself just as much as, if not more than, to others. I believe it also speaks to how deeply we are affected by the environments or cultures that we grow up in, and how they can lead not only to physical conflict among different people, but also to conflicts within ourselves. Definitely a thought provoking and worthwhile read.
May 5, 2017
Honest . BRAVE! Daughter of famous poet , the author Emily Pearson tells of inane, mad, decisions made by the adults in her innocent childhood . Her parents seemingly liberal , blind child rearing is incomprehensible . She somehow survived -- " Church and State." A beautiful woman who lost childhood faith , but found a beautiful faith that saved her . " WHAT's GOOD FOR THE SOUL - DO THAT."
March 30, 2021
Loved this book, it is unforgettable. Some parts were hard to read because of the cold hard truth within her story and the similarities to my own life. Very validating. Bravo!
March 20, 2021
As someone who has gone through their own faith crisis and left Mormonism, I LOVED this book. I found so much of it relatable and understood the toll that going through a faith journey can have in your life. It was well written and covered issues with the church in a non-biased way. She shared her story and her truth without attacking anyone for how they choose to believe.
April 18, 2012
A memoir by the daughter of author Carol Lynn Pearson (who wrote Goodbye, I Love You), mainly focused around her experiences with Mormonism, the gay community, and her struggle to learn how to think for herself.
I'm sorry to say I was disappointed in this book. There is a lot of fascinating material here - her mother was a famous Mormon author, and her father a closeted gay man who came out and ended the marriage. So she grows up seesawing schizophrenically between very conservative Mormondom and wildly liberal gay San Francisco in the 70s. When her father dies of AIDS, she turns to her religion for comfort to the point of fanaticism, and basically becomes a willing mind control victim in search of someone, anyone, to brainwash her. In this way, she nearly marries a crazy Mormon polygamist she's known for just a week, and basically gets buffeted around for decades by all kinds of kooks and loonies (boyfriends who speak with God and the devil, pretend therapists, Church authorities who predict her future through "blessings," etc.) Several people she's close to die horrific deaths from AIDS and cancer, and she has flashbacks to ritual sex abuse she believes she suffered as a child. On top of it all, she marries her own closeted gay Mormon man who cheats on her with gay sex binges.
Unfortunately, the execution often comes across as very self-help-y and even New Age-y. The ever-present danger in writing a book about your own messy past is that you really have to get an emotional distance from the messiness, and to have grown far beyond the messiness, in order to pull it off. If the book reads like the author is still close to the mess, the reader tends to want to just write the author off as a crazy person and resist getting emotionally involved. Here you get the sense that her emergence from the messiness is still pretty recent, and while she has clearly come a long way, she is not really over it.
It's funny - in trying to pinpoint what bothered me about the book, I wonder if what's needed to make a memoir like this effective is a double irony, or maybe two levels of irony. There's the first level, where you slap your head and say, "Oh my God, what was I thinking doing all these nutty things? I was completely crazy!" That's the level on which most of this book takes place, but there's just not enough emotional distance between the narrator and her material to make her seem like a reliable and sympathetic speaker. Then there's another level above that, where the irony doubles back on itself, and the narrator sees the humor in not having fully appreciated the irony at the time, and becomes ironic about his or her own initial sense of irony. Maybe it's the ability to see the irony in the irony that makes for sophisticated and insightful writing about one's past? I don't know, something to think about.
(Minor note: As someone who's delved into typography a bit, I also found the formatting to be flawed - though I doubt many people would be as bothered by it as I was, reading a book set all in ragged right was painful!)
I'm sorry to say I was disappointed in this book. There is a lot of fascinating material here - her mother was a famous Mormon author, and her father a closeted gay man who came out and ended the marriage. So she grows up seesawing schizophrenically between very conservative Mormondom and wildly liberal gay San Francisco in the 70s. When her father dies of AIDS, she turns to her religion for comfort to the point of fanaticism, and basically becomes a willing mind control victim in search of someone, anyone, to brainwash her. In this way, she nearly marries a crazy Mormon polygamist she's known for just a week, and basically gets buffeted around for decades by all kinds of kooks and loonies (boyfriends who speak with God and the devil, pretend therapists, Church authorities who predict her future through "blessings," etc.) Several people she's close to die horrific deaths from AIDS and cancer, and she has flashbacks to ritual sex abuse she believes she suffered as a child. On top of it all, she marries her own closeted gay Mormon man who cheats on her with gay sex binges.
Unfortunately, the execution often comes across as very self-help-y and even New Age-y. The ever-present danger in writing a book about your own messy past is that you really have to get an emotional distance from the messiness, and to have grown far beyond the messiness, in order to pull it off. If the book reads like the author is still close to the mess, the reader tends to want to just write the author off as a crazy person and resist getting emotionally involved. Here you get the sense that her emergence from the messiness is still pretty recent, and while she has clearly come a long way, she is not really over it.
It's funny - in trying to pinpoint what bothered me about the book, I wonder if what's needed to make a memoir like this effective is a double irony, or maybe two levels of irony. There's the first level, where you slap your head and say, "Oh my God, what was I thinking doing all these nutty things? I was completely crazy!" That's the level on which most of this book takes place, but there's just not enough emotional distance between the narrator and her material to make her seem like a reliable and sympathetic speaker. Then there's another level above that, where the irony doubles back on itself, and the narrator sees the humor in not having fully appreciated the irony at the time, and becomes ironic about his or her own initial sense of irony. Maybe it's the ability to see the irony in the irony that makes for sophisticated and insightful writing about one's past? I don't know, something to think about.
(Minor note: As someone who's delved into typography a bit, I also found the formatting to be flawed - though I doubt many people would be as bothered by it as I was, reading a book set all in ragged right was painful!)
January 4, 2013
3.5 stars --4 for interest and emotional impact, 3 for execution
Maybe it's not fair to rate somebody's personal story this way.
Despite some organizational problems and the fact that she needed a better editor(s), Ms. Pearson's story made me laugh and cry and cringe at all the right moments.
I kept waiting for Emily to stop going to see that professional "blessing-giver," a friend who taught at YBU (misplacement of letters intentional). He promises a personal visit from the Savior to heal her boyfriend's stage-4 cancer. The savior doesn't show up, and the man Professor X had promised would be her eternal companion and the father of her children dies. She meets someone else. Same blessing-monger promises her this man is her earthly companion and the future father of her children; that, although she is still in love with the man who died, she should exercise faith and marry in the temple and "the Lord" would sort things out as to whom she would spend eternity with, since he'd already declared the dead man her "soul mate." The man she marries is gay, but has been through "reparative therapy," and as long as Emily is "feminine enough," --whatever the hell that means-- she is promised that he will not relapse. Emily, whose faith in everyone but herself is strong, trusts him again, and finds herself in a marriage she will soon have to muster the courage to get out of.
She writes of hanging out in "The Castro" with her fresh-out-of-the closet dad, the friends she made there, and of watching her father and some of these other guys who had become dear to her die of AIDS. And she makes the astute observation that the "religious closet" is infinitely more confining and crippling than the "gay closet." Her dad and her husband endured both.
A good read for anyone questioning their faith or looking for hope. Emily is a survivor, a courageous woman who unflinchingly shares some very dark moments, emerging from those dark places a stronger, more self-reliant individual.
Maybe it's not fair to rate somebody's personal story this way.
Despite some organizational problems and the fact that she needed a better editor(s), Ms. Pearson's story made me laugh and cry and cringe at all the right moments.
I kept waiting for Emily to stop going to see that professional "blessing-giver," a friend who taught at YBU (misplacement of letters intentional). He promises a personal visit from the Savior to heal her boyfriend's stage-4 cancer. The savior doesn't show up, and the man Professor X had promised would be her eternal companion and the father of her children dies. She meets someone else. Same blessing-monger promises her this man is her earthly companion and the future father of her children; that, although she is still in love with the man who died, she should exercise faith and marry in the temple and "the Lord" would sort things out as to whom she would spend eternity with, since he'd already declared the dead man her "soul mate." The man she marries is gay, but has been through "reparative therapy," and as long as Emily is "feminine enough," --whatever the hell that means-- she is promised that he will not relapse. Emily, whose faith in everyone but herself is strong, trusts him again, and finds herself in a marriage she will soon have to muster the courage to get out of.
She writes of hanging out in "The Castro" with her fresh-out-of-the closet dad, the friends she made there, and of watching her father and some of these other guys who had become dear to her die of AIDS. And she makes the astute observation that the "religious closet" is infinitely more confining and crippling than the "gay closet." Her dad and her husband endured both.
A good read for anyone questioning their faith or looking for hope. Emily is a survivor, a courageous woman who unflinchingly shares some very dark moments, emerging from those dark places a stronger, more self-reliant individual.
December 5, 2013
I read this the same weekend I read Elizabeth Smart's retelling of her ordeal. Both books delve into some of the same territory in a way. Where Elizabeth somehow managed to find salvation in her religion while it simultaneously being used to manipulate her (or at least trying) by her captor - Emily Pearson tries mightily to find salvation in her religion while allowing it to drown her the whole while. This is intense. It's hard to read and you keep wanting to tell her to do and think and make different decisions than she does but you feel completely helpless watching her spiral into increasingly more unhealthy ways of coping. And it really isn't her fault. I get it. If religion is Elizabeth Smart's lifeboat, it ends up being Emily's anchor that drags her to the bottom. I know girls like Emily and I know girls like Elizabeth and all I can really say is that I don't feel like any of us can judge anyone else and their experience. We can just try to understand. I found it fascinating. I have to say I don't want to question anyone's experience, but tales of forced group abuse of children are notoriously difficult to authenticate and all I can say is that while I am completely sure this girl has been traumatized to some degree - that part of the book made me uncomfortable because I worry about false memory syndrome.
January 21, 2012
I LOVED LOVED LOVED this book.
Emily did an amazing job telling her tragic and traumatic story in a way that made me laugh. I loved her sense of humor. I loved the things she thought about. I loved the way she described what it was like to live in her head, because it felt SO familiar...
It felt very validating to read about what she went through to heal from her childhood sexual abuse. It felt amazing to read her thoughts on growing up LDS, and how the teachings affected her, because I'd experienced so many things that were so similar.
I appreciated the way she talked about her boyfriend and the feelings she went through to try to break up with him, because he was abusing her, and he didn't even know it. When she described how she felt when he touched her, I sobbed...
Emily is a great storyteller and an amazing woman. I enjoyed getting to know her through her book.
Emily did an amazing job telling her tragic and traumatic story in a way that made me laugh. I loved her sense of humor. I loved the things she thought about. I loved the way she described what it was like to live in her head, because it felt SO familiar...
It felt very validating to read about what she went through to heal from her childhood sexual abuse. It felt amazing to read her thoughts on growing up LDS, and how the teachings affected her, because I'd experienced so many things that were so similar.
I appreciated the way she talked about her boyfriend and the feelings she went through to try to break up with him, because he was abusing her, and he didn't even know it. When she described how she felt when he touched her, I sobbed...
Emily is a great storyteller and an amazing woman. I enjoyed getting to know her through her book.
November 16, 2015
This is the type of book I would have read all in one sitting if other things hadn't been in the way. There are some parts that were tough to read though, so trigger warning on abuse and some "evil spirit" stuff. I loved her writing style and I identified with her journey growing up in the same hometown of Provo. I look forward to reading her Mom's book now too, and I'm glad I read hers first. I would love to sit at a Q and A with her. So many questions on how she has coped with and explained some of the things she went through.
September 22, 2015
Wow. Emily's story truly is crazy. As far as her Mormon upbringing, she nailed the problems right on the head: impossible promises made by priesthood authorities, inhuman expectations and requirements for "exaltation", and the continuous lie that she had any real choices beyond obedience.
Although her circumstances were a world away from mine, her mentality of obedient sacrifice and her craze to do the "right" thing is something that we shared.
And, I won't spoil it, but what a triumphant ending!
Although her circumstances were a world away from mine, her mentality of obedient sacrifice and her craze to do the "right" thing is something that we shared.
And, I won't spoil it, but what a triumphant ending!
December 3, 2011
Emily does a wonderful job of sharing her innermost self with her readers. When one connects with Emily as a child, a young woman - excited, scared and consumed with all the expectations of others, one connects with oneself. Our scariest, saddest and most confusing moments meld with hers because she has been where some of us have also been. She is talented enough to give voice to our greatest fears. She has worked hard to overcome so many obstacles and has emerged as a talented writer.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 20, 2012
I read this book because I knew her cousin back in college and I knew something of her story. I was just interested to see how things have turned out for her. She's had a very rough go of things. She is no longer a member of the LDS church, which is regrettable, but happily she seems to be healing from her traumas and moving on with her life on her own terms. I think Emily is beautiful and talented and I wish her well.
February 28, 2014
Emily is one of the most amazing people in the Exmormon community. This book chronicles her childhood as the daughter of a celebrity LDS author and a gay man as well as her more recent experiences as the wife and ex-wife of a gay mormon man. Ultimately the complex realities of her family and personal life lead her away from the LDS faith. 5/5 for emotional depth and impact. 4/5 for a few editing glitches.
This book is a must read for LGBT and allies associated with the Mormon community.
This book is a must read for LGBT and allies associated with the Mormon community.
April 2, 2012
I read this book in one gulp. Yes, she is crazy. But she knows she is and judging from the narcissitic/co-dependent relationship she had with her father, she has every reason to be. Good news, she just might be on the mend and coming into her own. Parents, beware of the generational havoc you may wreck on your children!
December 31, 2011
The title says it all - Crazy! The epilogue is worth the read alone.
August 6, 2016
Good read. Easy to empathize with Emily and her journey. Sometimes the personal stories were more detailed and longer than I prefer but overall, the book is well written.
February 3, 2012
Great book, great perspective. Felt empowered and hopeful after reading it.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews